“Straightening, Jesus said to her, ‘Woman, where are they? Is there no one to condemn you'” (John 8.10)?
“Save yourself,” the voice says in Latin, “from hell.”
By the time the crew of the Lewis and Clark translate this broadcast, things have already started to get strange aboard the abandoned ship Event Horizon in the 1997 film of the same name. The crew have begun to experience auditory and visual hallucinations, all of them related to the deep, secret regrets of their pasts.
The Event Horizon, we learn, carries an experimental drive that it was thought would allow them to fold space, enabling travel across vast interstellar distances in very little time. At the time of the story, the ship was thought lost, having disappeared without communication for years. But a distress signal has brought the Lewis and Clark to find out what happened and if there are any survivors.
We learn that the experimental drive that they’d hoped would open the universe to humanity instead opened up some dark dimension that drove the original crew of the Event Horizon into madness and murder. It’s now doing the same thing with a new crew, who are finding it very hard to leave the ship behind, and resist succumbing to its reality.
Jesus, as I’ve noted in other posts, talked a lot about reality. Again and again, he presented his vision of a world where the first are last and last first, where the poor, grieving, and meek are honored not as a future occurrence but as a present state, a reality that can be experienced. It is the way of things, if we choose to see them that way.
But there’s a converse to this vision that Jesus and other early Christians hinted at. It’s the flip side of what Jesus encourages. And it too is a choice that can form our reality. One very like the dimension the Event Horizon opened.
Jesus is presented with a woman who has been, allegedly, caught in the act of adultery. After spoiling everyone’s excitement over a public stoning, Jesus takes the woman by the hand and shows her that there is no one there to accuse her. In reality, there is no one to condemn her.
But there is someone, isn’t there? There is, perhaps, the most vicious and relentless accuser, at least that I know of: herself. And she’s the one who Jesus is wanting to see that there is no one who holds onto this moment.
On the Event Horizon, the crew find themselves haunted by their pasts. They are confronted by visions only they can see of the perceived wrongs, errors, failures of their lives. And deep within the bowels of this haunted ship, they struggle to escape from the pull of that other dimension: a reality of regret and pain and torture. Hell, for lack of a better world.
It’s a reality that can pull at us. We don’t need a device to open up a place of darkness; because, our own minds are skilled at doing so. As the Event Horizon appears to do, our minds and memories can play over and over our regrets, and subject us to our only accuser—ourselves.
In this moment, as in many others, Jesus’ desire for us is the same he had for the woman accused: to see that no one is holding onto this perceived failure. It is why he asks her where are the accusers. He wants her to see that there is no one. Which means any regret is coming from within her, just as it comes from within us. And just as we can choose to see the Divine Reality around us, we can also choose to see ourselves surrounded by our regrets.
And like the distant voice in the film, Jesus is reminding us that we can choose. We can save ourselves from that hell.
Holy One, save me from the hell of my shame.